That was the widespread news headline, in one form or another (minus the ‘political suicide’ bit, of course) on Thursday, September 16th, 2021. The main news item was that Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, and sophomore-term House member Ro Khanna, D-Ca, sent letters hours earlier to four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups, demanding that they appear in front of the Oversight Committee on October 28, and that they bring documents with them showing how they were engaged in — no joke! — “in a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” Those were the actual words in the nearly identical letters, which can be viewed in their entirety at the links within the Oversight Committees website page’s press release.
How could this House Oversight Committee stunt be revealed to be act of political suicide? If the ‘defense witnesses’ at the October 28 hearing decide to seize the leadership opportunity on this, they could show how the ‘industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns‘ accusation only points a huge arrow at where the real disinformation efforts are apparently seen in this issue, a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve pushed a pair of never-implemented, ‘leaked industry memo sets’ that are worthless to prove any “industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation” exists anywhere. Plus, the sheer lack of viable evidence behind the accusation points an even bigger arrow at the basic journalistic malfeasance on the part of mainstream media news reporters, when it comes to their decades-long failure to ask probing questions about the basic accusation, which dates back to the 1990s.
The six Maloney and Khanna letters are embarrassingly based on two elemental false premises. First, the notion that the science of catastrophic man-caused global warming is settled. PhD-level climatologists / atmospheric physicists, along with experts in statistical data gathering and analysis heavily dispute that, which the letters don’t even mention. Second, the letters are based on the notion that the accusations about ‘Big Coal & Oil’ executives paying/orchestrating skeptic scientists to spread lies is also a ‘settled discussion.’ It most certainly is not, and a person does not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where the fatal problems are with the accusation and the core group of people who’ve long promulgated it.
I have no expertise in climate science; I leave that area to the qualified experts in it. But I have over decade’s worth of experience when it comes to examining the massively troubling aspects of the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation. So, let’s start with the basic – predictable! – accusation in the Maloney and Khanna letters (Exxon version composite screencapture here) …
Public reporting indicates that ExxonMobil and its allies in the fossil fuel industry have worked to prevent serious action on global warming by generating doubt about the documented dangers of fossil fuels … some of the same tactics the tobacco industry used to resist regulation while selling products that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.4 …
In response to these developments, fossil fuel industry actors reportedly sought to counteract prevailing scientific knowledge. A 1998 memorandum .. detailed plans for a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting the media, the public, and policymakers. In discussing actions around climate policy, the memorandum declared, “victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science”and when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.'”8
Reports indicate that fossil fuel companies continued their climate “counter movement” by contributing millions of dollars to academic and policy groups to influence third-party promotion of climate misinformation.9
No matter where you go in the political side of the global warming issue, the two literal best bits of so-called ‘evidence’ to prove industry-led disinformation campaigns exist is the “victory will be achieved” memo set and the “reposition global warming as theory” memo set. No need to trust me on this, do internet searches of both phrases and see just how often one or the other or both come up in enviro-activist screeds against the fossil fuel industry. I’m surprised the Maloney and Khanna letters didn’t refer to the “reposition global warming” set.
Oh, wait, they did, three times … but in an indirect manner. For their footnote #4, they cite a 2015 UK Guardian article by Desmogblog’s Graham Readfearn (that Desmog Readfearn) who not only prominently mentioned the “victory” memos, but also the “reposition” memos just three paragraphs later. The Maloney and Khanna letters also cite the Union of Concerned Scientists “Deception Dossiers” in footnote #4; the two ‘best’ bits of evidence in those “Dossiers” are the same two memo sets of leaked memos. In my 7/9/15 blog post, I detailed how there’s considerably more problems with the way UCS’ scans collection of those within a larger documents collection is one page short of Greenpeace’s 50-page collection — UCS deleted Greenpeace’s “Ozone Action” cover page. (Ozone Action – remember that name, it will come up again shortly)
Where’s the third Maloney and Khanna letters indirect mention of the “reposition global warming” set? It’s within their footnote #9 for the September 2020 BBC web page report. The BBC report itself first quotes the “reposition global warming” memos, then offers a quip from Naomi Oreskes on how the energy industry manufactures doubt (where have we seen that before?) and the BBC report quotes sentences out of the “victory” memo set. But there’s far more problems with that BBC News piece, it actually stems from an August 2020 BBC Radio 4 broadcast report, which I not only dissected for its faults and for its reliance on Kert Davies for the “reposition” memo set in particular (Kert Davies – remember that name, it will come up again shortly), I have an ongoing complaint filed at the BBC over the inaccuracies presented in that Radio 4 report.
See the pattern here? Again, no need to trust me on this, do an independent search among news reports about ‘Big Oil’ disinformation campaigns to see how those two memo sets are the best enviros have to indict the fossil fuel industry. Al Gore spelled out the “reposition global warming” phrase full screen in his 2006 movie, and those two sets are seen as ‘cornerstone evidence’ in the majority of the current 20+ global warming lawsuits, including Honolulu v Sunoco. Give the Maloney and Khanna letters credit at least for quoting the “victory will be achieved” memos directly at a minimum.
What’s the fatal problem with both memo sets? Neither sets’ directives / goals / suggestions were ever implemented by any industry executive anywhere at any time. The “reposition global warming” set was not even solicited to the group it was sent to. In my April 2021 interview of former API Executive VP / COO William O’Keefe, he told how totally overblown the API “victory will be achieved” memo set has been from 1998 to the present time, and how it was never implemented. The memo sets are therefore worthless as evidence to support the accusation that industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to spread lies in disinformation campaigns designed to undercut the IPCC’s and Al Gore’s “settled global warming science.”
The problems don’t stop there. For the remark about “think tanks and advocacy organizations .. heavily funded by ExxonMobil,” the Maloney and Khanna letters cite Robert Brulle. Who is Brulle? He is among a group of sociologists who, when they aren’t citing each other regarding evidence of a ‘fossil fuel industry climate misinformation machine,’ are citing Ross Gelbspan for the ‘corrupt skeptics’ accusation. In one paper he co-authored, it couldn’t get past its first page